Federal Fathers & Mothers: A Social History of the United States Indian Service, 1869-1933

Essie Horne, a Shoshone teacher in the Indian Service, remembered the
coming of the Indian New Deal with great enthusiasm. “Those days were so
exciting!” she wrote. “Finally, we no longer had to hide the fact that we were
incorporating our cultural values into the curriculum and student life.” It is
essential to note that what had changed for Horne was not her methods but
the willingness of officials at the Office of Indian Affairs to accommodate and
even celebrate Native traditions. Indeed, during the 1930s, the Indian Office
commended Horne for her pedagogy and appointed her to be a “Demonstration Teacher in Elementary Education and Indian Lore” at summer teaching
institutes.1 Horne’s account reminds us that personnel played a key role in the
implementation of federal policy, often according to their own agendas. Her
story also suggests how the Indian Office’s employment of thousands of Native people compels us to reinterpret the changes of the Indian New Deal as
part of a much longer and less visible period of resistance by Native workers
in the Indian Service. This should encourage us, in turn, to interpret federal
policy more broadly by paying close attention to the people who actually carried it out “on the ground.”

Our knowledge of the Indian New Deal generally focuses on John Collier,
the commissioner of Indian affairs who set much of the legislative agenda into
motion.2 Collier’s administration did enact major changes to federal Indian
policy by introducing an emphasis on cultural relativism and a willingness to
celebrate “traditional” Native ways of life. But there were also continuities
with earlier policies, particularly the Indian Office’s tendency toward paternalism and essentialist thinking about Indigenous cultures.3 The centerpiece
of the Indian New Deal was the passage of the Indian Reorganization Act
(also known as the Wheeler-Howard Act) in 1934. The act had three substantive components. The first repealed allotment, restored surplus reservation
lands to tribal ownership, and set aside limited funds with which tribes could
buy back land. This represented a dramatic shift in policy because it reversed
the changes brought on by the Dawes Act of 1887, which had resulted in the

Notes for this page

Questia, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. www.questia.comPublication information:
Book title: Federal Fathers & Mothers: A Social History of the United States Indian Service, 1869-1933.
Contributors: Cathleen D. Cahill - Author.
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press.
Place of publication: Chapel Hill, NC.
Publication year: 2011.
Page number: 257.

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